Letters: Treat the mentally ill, don't jail them Los Angeles Times Los Angeles County can easily reduce its jail population by implementing Laura's Law and discharging eligible mentally ill inmates to assisted outpatient treatment.

SeversonTrends's insight:

"L.A. County's pilot program has reduced incarceration by 78% among participants. It's time to move from pilot to full-scale implementation and determine which jail inmates should be enrolled."

Spokane County looks to extend mental health court tax The Spokesman Review She had just appeared in mental health court to update District Court Judge Randy Brandt on her progress in controlling her depression and alcoholism.

SeversonTrends's insight:

"The program provides treatment, greater accountability and housing for hundreds of people who might otherwise drift from crisis to crisis and arrest to arrest. It’s widely considered a success and is credited with dramatically reducing jail costs. " Other counties should look at Mental Health courts as a way to save money in the long term.

What is wrong with this picture? According to figures obtained from the Department of Justice, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) reports that back in 1999, sixteen percent of the prisoners in State and Federal jails and prisons had a diagnosable major mental illness. [...] It has gotten worse since then. At the end of 2011, 2,266,800 adults and approximately 71,000 juveniles were incarcerated in Federal and State prisons, and jails. That is 2,337,800 incarcerated inmates. If the sixteen percent figure holds, and there is no reason to believe it hasn’t, there are now about 374,000 mentally ill inmates in correctional facilities. “Correctional facility” is an oxymoron when it comes to providing treatment.

Since developing their mental health unit — now a full division — Houston police have dramatically reduced the number of people with mental illness who are detained against their will.

SeversonTrends's insight:

"Houston is the first police department in the nation to devote an entire division to mental health. The department has five programs aimed at helping people in psychiatric crisis avoid arrest — including a homeless outreach team, a team dedicated to identifying chronic consumers and a team of 10 officers who are paired with mental health counselors to go out on calls for help."

She writes: "Today, our largest mental hospitals are our jails. The jail at New York’s Rikers’ Island functions as the nation’s largest psychiatric facility. Los Angeles’ jails – not its hospitals – are California’s largest providers of mental health care. State prisons alone spend nearly $5 billion annually to incarcerate mentally ill inmates who are not violennt"

Over the past 25 years, crisis intervention team training has spread among law enforcement agencies across the country. Now it is being tested in the nation's prisons, which have become the largest repositories for people with mental health problems.

SeversonTrends's insight:

Thankfully some prison systems are starting to realize that they need special training to deal with the large number of mentally ill people they deal with on a daily basis.

Many of the calls police officers are sent on involve people with mental illness. Often they end in tragedy, with the death of the suspect or the officer.

SeversonTrends's insight:

"But when the Memphis police chief told him to deal with the public reaction to the shooting, Cochran started talking to mental health experts and families. And he realized that most situations could be defused if police officers were trained to approach mentally ill people differently from common criminals — slowly, calmly and recognizing that the person may not be seeing the situation clearly. According to the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with mental illness, there are now about 200 or 300 police departments around the country with active training programs. The center's position is that what's really needed are community services where people with mental illness can get treatment and support, so that crises can be avoided in the first place."

"The attorneys for the inmates say the level of mental health care for condemned prisoners is so substandard that Karlton should order a mental health assessment of death row prisoners and creation of a psychiatric center there to handle all levels of treatment."

Michael Labuschagne Chapter 10 defence of the accused: Since they are on death row it appears almost pointless to actually give a lot of treatment. This is how they see them. Mentally ill people, you use to not be able to sentence them to death, but i guess this has gotten changed in Calif. It sort of makes sense that, yes they are going to but, they should still deserve better treatment that exceeds a normal inmate that has just done wrong.

It is always great to see improvements being made, but sad that they have come at the price of others’ lives and because of litigation. It would still be better if the people with mental health problems could be treated before they get into the prison pipeline.

Benton County jail sees more mental health cases Mid Columbia Tri City Herald The Benton County jail is experiencing a "mission creep" from a criminal justice institution to one that's increasingly confronted with mental health and medical cases,...

SeversonTrends's insight:

There needs to be more community mental health and medical services made avaialbe to people. It is sad that many people have to go to jail to get access to these types of services.

Research from North Carolina State University, the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the University of South Florida shows that outpatient treatment of mental illness significantly reduces arrest rates for people with mental health problems and...

How do we convince law and decision makers? Show them that they can save money. Look like they've cleaned up crime. Reduced prison populations and actually helped people receive access to life changing help.

"As troubling as the circumstances of Voe's death are, his is just one of dozens of stories of mental-health needs allegedly being ignored at [East Mississippi Correction Facility] EMCF, which houses the most seriously mentally ill prisoners in Mississippi."

In times of strained budgets, states are trying creative ways to prepare people with mental illness to stand trial.

SeversonTrends's insight:

“The so-called mock trials, to try to teach a mentally ill person who the judge is, prosecutor is, defense attorney is, in order to be declared competent to stand trial and face life in prison, or death, seems to me to be in conflict with the basic Hippocratic oath of the medical professionals,” he says. “It seems to me that’s an outrageous thing and clearly wrong.”

Forcing antipsychotic drugs on patients for the sole reason of preparing them for trial, if they wouldn’t otherwise be prescribed, is similarly questionable, the attorney says.

"In mental hospitals across the country, psychiatrists prepare criminal defendants for trial using innovative therapies such as this make-believe hearing, where patients and clinicians played the key courtroom roles. The process, they believe, reduces recidivism and protects public safety." [...] "But lawmakers in a number of states are scrambling to cut the cost of preparing mentally ill criminal defendants for trial. Dozens have authorized outpatient programs. Several, including Texas, are considering plans to provide treatment in jail." [...] "Faced with long hospital waiting lists for such treatment, more than 30 states have authorized outpatient programs designed to expedite the process and save money, according to a report by Reena Kapoor, a psychiatry expert at Yale University of Medicine. In Texas, according to a government budget analysis, state hospitals achieve a 75 percent success rate, at a cost of $421 for an average stay of 120 days. Outpatient treatment, at a reduced cost of $106 per day, has produced a success rate of 55 percent Charges were dropped against another 11 percent."

Lawmakers and other elected officials in Berks County know the prison system is full of individuals who have serious mental health and substance abuse problems and would be better served in a treatment facility – but there is not much they can do...

SeversonTrends's insight:

In the United States the mentally ill are housed in prisons more often than getting the help they need.

Armando Cruz tied a noose around his neck and hanged himself from the ceiling of his prison cell. He left a note that ended in two chilling words.

SeversonTrends's insight:

A 2006 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that over half of all jail and prison inmates have mental health issues; an estimated 1.25 million suffered from mental illness, over four times the number in 1998. Research suggests that people with mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system by rates of two to four times the normal population.

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